PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

You're listening to The Six Figure Series, a four-part series for stylists already at six figures in their business. Today, we're diving into part three, and we're going to talk about the real reason that you can't see your next level, even though you feel ready for it. For most stylists, that lack of clarity that keeps you grasping for “What should I do next when I have all this experience behind me?” is often the result of being conditioned to feel like constantly running around and being busy and overbooked, even 24/7, is what makes you “successful.”

In the last episode, we covered creative CEO decision-making. Today, we're going deeper into what happens when you stay on the hamster wheel, even after you hire help. So you're paying people to execute tasks in your business, but you are still the bottleneck because you haven't created space to think, to plan, or to become the next version of you that is required to hit the next level of whatever success is for you. Here's the thing: being busy is not a business strategy. It is a way of making your ego feel like everything is going to be okay.

One of my clients recently told me the other day that despite being well into six figures—my guess is she's between $250,000 to $300,000—she is still operating like she's just grateful to be here. She is just grateful to have clients. That is a nervous system response because the facts on paper tell a really different story about how in demand she is. If you want to scale and create the space you actually want in your business so you can feel like the expert that you are, then you're going to have to get honest about what is keeping you in this hamster wheel of always being busy.

When you're constantly busy and barely have time to think about what you want for yourself and your business, you are in survival mode. I know this firsthand because I have to spend a lot of time making sure that my brain isn't drifting back into that territory because it is the natural default for me, despite having a very healthy and thriving business. Fight or flight is a high state of alert that your nervous system goes into when there is a perceived threat. Again, perceived can be real or imagined.

For stylists at six figures, the common theme is this: the fear is that if they stop, the money stops. If they slow down, everything that they built will just poof, go away. If you say no to a client, despite how difficult they are, you won’t get another one. That if you take time to work on your business instead of in it, everything will fall apart. You stay booked, and you stay busy. Because of the fact that there is no white space on your calendar, your nervous system interprets that as safety. Safety has been interpreted as success. So busy is safe is success. That is the equation most stylists are operating from.

Now, you need to be making enough income, but being busy and not having any time to think about what your next level is going to be about, or what else you want for yourself, or what you've outgrown in your business, is not the same thing as having a healthy business. You need to have the space to be able to think about what comes next after a certain period of time. You have to evaluate what's working, you have to evaluate what's not working—not just for the business, but for you as a person—because my guess is you have evolved.

Here's the cost that is really, really hard to see when you're in the day-to-day of your business of always being busy: you become unreachable to the opportunities that would take you to your next level. You can't even see them because you're moving so fast. You couldn't take them if they showed up tomorrow because your calendar is full of one-to-one client work that you probably shouldn't even still be doing to some degree. You can't become the person who operates at your next level because you don't have any space to evolve and even think about what you want that level to look like.

Busy keeps you small, and it keeps you safe, and it keeps you exactly where you are year after year. So if you want to be a speaker, a thought leader, somebody who works with a different caliber of clients, or creates online education, or scales in some way that is different from what you have right now, you need time to practice, to build, to think. You can't do that when you're still taking on clients at rates that you set in 2017 because you're too afraid that if you let them go, new good things that can meet you where you are today won't follow.

Here's why being on this hamster wheel of always going, always being booked, having multiple clients a week, sometimes multiple clients a day, gets really expensive. Your team and the people that maybe you've hired as contractors to help you are executing, but you're still doing all of the revenue-generating work in client delivery, which means you're probably not in a good position to lead them and help them become better at doing the work that they need to do to keep your business going.

Because you haven't made the decision to change what you are doing, or who you are doing it for, or what you want for your future, nothing shifts. The off-ramp from your booked and busy business seems completely out of sight. On top of that, I often see that stylists who hit six figures hire help and then unconsciously recreate the same workload that they had and were hoping to get rid of once they hired help, but now they have a higher price point. They raise their rates, but then they don't change their business model.

They are still trading time for money. They are still in the weeds, even though they got help to have a little bit more time on their schedule, a little bit more time on the calendar to think about what they want to do next. The worst part of all this is these stylists that I work with, they're working so hard, but they still constantly feel guilty for not being further along. They say things like, “I'm at this level, I finally achieved this amount of money or this financial milestone. I have people that I'm working with, I've been able to hire some folks, I should technically have space. Why do I still feel this way?”

Because you're not letting yourself slow down enough to redesign what you're doing. You've added support, but you haven't done the most important step—subtract the things that no longer serve you. Until you do that, you're going to stay exactly where you are, but you're just going to have higher overhead.

Here's the thing that I know is really, really scary to hear, but when you're in it and you have someone supporting you through it, it's actually really a wonderful feeling. At some point, you will have to slow down in order to speed up. That might mean turning down certain clients or finally letting old ones go, or letting people know that your prices are going to start increasing after years of that never happening. If they want to come with you, great. If they don't, great.

It might mean letting go of certain revenue streams that aren't showing that they can upsell ideal clients or are just exhausting to execute. It will likely mean admitting that you cannot bring everyone with you—professionally, and often, what you find at this period is personally too. Let me say it again: you cannot bring everyone with you.

If you want to work with clients who invest $25K, $40K a year in your services, you cannot still be serving clients paying you the equivalent of $500 for a closet edit or whatever price you were offering when they signed with you years and years ago. Not because they're bad people, not because you don't love them, but because you can't become the stylist who commands six-figure project rates while you're still operating as a stylist for hire that will do whatever job comes her way instead of an expert.

You have to make room for your next level. Making room requires decisions. I want to say at this point, though, many stylists in the industry don't even know what opportunities are possible for them. That's what my hope is with this podcast, is to let you guys see that there are so many ways of being a stylist. There are so many more revenue-generating opportunities than most people are aware of, especially once you've really mastered that one-to-one and gotten to six figures.

But it requires saying no to things that maybe feel safe right now and keep you small. It's going to require blocking time that doesn't generate immediate revenue, like if you were shopping for someone, but builds an infrastructure for your future and for you to grow. It requires admitting that some clients you are holding on to aren't helping you grow into the person that you are meant to be. They are just keeping you busy and making you feel safe because you know they're always going to show up every season.

This is where it's easy to panic, but I assure you, this happens so rarely. When I tell a client, “You're going to have to let go of these particular clients,” after we talk it through, they automatically think, “What if no one replaces them?” But here's what I know from almost two decades of being in business, most of those as a stylist: the clients, the opportunities, the income you're looking for cannot come in if there is no space for them.

You're not making room because you're clinging to what got you here. That's also not allowing your brain and your mind to imagine more for you because it's keeping you stuck in the old version of who you are. I understand that it feels risky, but you are not stepping backwards. You are clearing the path for what's meant to come in for you and for you to slow down and be able to properly assess in your body, in your nervous system, “Is this the direction I want to go in?”

I also just want to say, as I share this thought process with you, that there's a way to do this that isn't like we pull the rug out from underneath you. We're not getting rid of everybody at once. This is a phased process.

I have done this phased process in my own business as a stylist and now in this business, and as long as you're making sure that you're being consistent on pruning out the things that don't make you lit up and excited anymore, it's usually not that big of a hit to your income because you have a sense of what will replace it. When I work with clients, we build out the strategy to do so, so it's not like we're taking things away and then imagining what could be. But you might have to take one less client one season and tell yourself, “Okay, Fridays, I'm going to go to a coffee shop and think about my future.” That's not going to break your business at six figures.

When you're trying to just make $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, $100,000, that feels like a really big risk, which is why I'm talking about the nervous system. Because if you get rid of one client when you're at multiple six figures, that's not that big of a deal when you have a plan to make it up later, because you already know you're the kind of person that's going to follow through on your word and get results because you have all the income results to show you that. So this can feel like a bigger deal than it is when I talk like this, but I do just want to make it clear—it’s one thing at a time. It's never all at once because that's too much for anybody to handle.

Either way, no matter how you go into this process, the next level of who you want to become—especially if you're burnt out from being in closets and doing all the shopping yourself and trying to figure out the social media or trying to manage your team in order to produce effective marketing and social media—what I know for sure is that your next level is going to require you to get rid of the mentality that hustling is the answer because experts don't hustle. This is not about more hours, and most of the time, it is not about more clients, which is why so much of this is mental.

It's a new way of looking at yourself and who you are stepping into. It's going to require you to step into a new version of yourself, to take stock of all of the things that you have been successful at up to this point, and decide which of those you want to do more of and what new things you want to bring in. Not because you weren't good at everything else, but because that's just not how you want your day-to-day experience of your business to be anymore. You cannot become that person if you are stuck in survival mode.

A sign of survival mode is that you think that more hours and more clients is the solution when you already have a depth of experience that you could be leveraging to work less hours with less people. Say you want to be a public speaker. You need time to write talks, to practice public speaking, to pitch yourself, to practice on stages. You can't do that if your week is booked back-to-back with shopping sessions.

If you want to build a scalable offer—a course, a program, a membership that actually lasts more than two minutes (like most of them don't)—a licensing deal, or a product line, I've worked with clients on all of these things. You need time to create it, to test it, to refine it. I have a client that just wrote an entire color analysis program for personal stylists. That's the first in the industry, but she had to dial it down a little in order to make it work. But it really was so exciting that it wasn't that big of a deal.

Honestly, she got it done so quickly that it wasn't really that much income lost. By the time she launched the whole thing, it will be about equal. But she now has the ability to go into the new year and be like, “Okay, I have an entirely new revenue stream that I'm super excited about.” That lets her let go of the one-off clients that weren't upselling to her bigger packages, that were draining her time and energy, and that she was just kind of hoping, honestly, she didn't even get sales calls with.

You don't have to do that if you're willing to say, “Okay, this short period of time, I'm going to hunker down and create something, and it's going to be an asset that gets me there in the future.” You just can't do it if you're depleted from one-to-one work. If you want to be seen as a luxury service provider, as an expert, as someone people go to in the space, you need to offer like one before it arrives. I wish that wasn't the case, but it's true.

That means that you're going to need more boundaries around your time. You're going to need to be more selective about the clients you take—not just because it's going to take up your actual time from you creating other things, but because it has an energetic cost at a certain point. There's a point when you're not as hungry anymore, when you have the skills underneath you that you need as a professional. Then it really can be very draining because you're not doing it for the love of learning anymore.

You happen to get paid as a stylist, but you're doing it just because you feel like you have to. But it's really hard to show up in spaces where your next-level dream client is or your next-level dream opportunities are when those clients are draining you. The stylists I work with who make this leap from doing all the time to really commanding an energy of expertise and leadership, they don't do it because they're suddenly more disciplined or they suddenly find more hours in the day, or I tell them to wake up at five. I'm never going to tell you to do that. That's crazy.

They do it because they finally give themselves permission to slow down and think about how they want their business to feel because they have more than earned that. They have to let go of what's not working and build the next level of their professional life from a place of clarity, which can't happen when they are constantly hustling and busy and constantly thinking of, “Oh, did I forget to get this person a skirt? Oh man, that person never got back to me. Oh, where are we with that client's online shop? I wonder if she ordered it. Did I deal with all those returns?”

There's going to be some element of that—I'm not going to lie to you—but some of it has to come off your plate. The clients that are there have to be assessed for being the right fit, so that it's worth it to have your mind in that many places. If you are at six figures, this is your permission slip. You do not have to bring everyone with you. In fact, you actually can't.

I'm sure part of you senses that, and maybe that's even what has kept you stuck—your fear of letting other people down. But you only get one life, and you don't have to honor every commitment that you made when you were a different version of yourself. People get promotions in their careers. People leave and go to other companies. Why are you keeping yourself to a standard that nobody else keeps themselves to?

You do not have to be busy and exhausted to prove that you are valuable. You already are valuable. Everybody listening to this is valuable, right? But you've already put in the hours to show that you are an expert. Let yourself have a moment to enjoy it, for crying out loud. You can raise your rates, and you can release clients who can't meet you there. That's the first step you can do from this series.

You can stop doing services immediately that drain you, especially if they are services that do not upsell into higher-tier packages, and you know how to upsell people. You can block off one week a month to build the thing that's going to take your business to the next level. I do this. It has made a massive difference in how much I can produce, and I don't do any calls at the end of the month. It's massive. It's so great.

Once in a while, I'll do a sales call, but that's it. Because if you are capable of building a six-figure personal styling business, then you are capable of all of the other things that you want to be—whether that be a thought leader, an online educator, a consultant for fashion tech. I don't know what you want, but whatever it is, it is absolutely in your reach because you have evidence that you are someone that follows through.

But it ain't going to happen if you're bringing all your clients from 2017 on your back with you. That's just not how it works. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. You cannot create your next level from a place of constantly being in motion and booked. You have to slow down, get honest about what you want for yourself, and make space.

That means you're going to let go of some things that aren't serving you. It means admitting that you can't bring everyone with you. It means you're going to have to choose the uncomfortable quiet of trying to figure out clearly what your next step is, instead of filling your calendar with more to-dos so you feel like you're busy and that's valuable, because that is a false equivalency.

Inside my Creative CEO container, we build the framework and capacity to make the shift without burning your whole business down so that it feels absolutely doable. It helps you get out of fight or flight so that you can see where you're going and become the person who gets there. If you're ready to stop hustling and start building your next level, head to the show notes, apply for a discovery call, and let's chat. Thank you for listening. I will see you in the next episode, which is the last in the series.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.